Inside Google+

This article was taken from the November 2011 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional
content bysubscribing
online.

For all of Google's successes
-- and there are many -- the company has an underwhelming track
record when it comes to social networks. Time after time, its
attempts to embrace social networking have been met with shrugs or
downright hostility. Last year it released Buzz, a social network based on users'
Gmail contacts. It seemed to be Google's best opportunity to dispel
the critique that social wasn't in its DNA.

But Buzz was an embarrassing debacle. The service publicised
users' contacts without asking permission, causing critics to
recoil. Though Google addressed those problems, the initial taint
stuck; Buzz is technically still buzzing (although will be shut
down by January 2012), but it's nowhere near the social powerhouse
the company had envisioned.

Now Google has returned with Google+, an
even more ambitious social service. Fifteen months in the making,
the sweeping initiative attempts to make sharing an integral part
of Google's array.

The Googlers were braced for a sceptical reception when Google+
was introduced as a "field test" in June. Instead, it was met with
unbridled enthusiasm. "We knew pretty quickly that we were on to
something," says Vic Gundotra, Google's senior vice president of
social initiatives. A few weeks later, Google announced that ten
million people had signed up for the service. By August, estimates
pegged the Google+ population at about 20 million. (Google wasn't
saying.)

The positive response was vindication for Bradley Horowitz
(pictured), Google's vice president of products. But Horowitz says
his team isn't taking any victory laps yet. He claims Google+ could
transform the whole company. We sat down with him to ask how.

Wired: What was the launch like?
Bradley Horowitz: It's a bit of a blur. We'd spent a lot of time
inoculating the team against the inevitable sniping. Then we got
this really positive response. But the sugar can be more insidious
than the vinegar. It's harder to ignore, and you can start
believing the hype. So we just encouraged everyone to put blinders
on and stay focused on the long term.

How was working on Google+ different from working on the
company's previous offerings?
Until now, every single Google property acted like a separate
company. Because of the way we grew, through various acquisitions
and the fierce independence of each division within Google, each
product veered off in its own direction. But Google+ is Google
itself. We're extending it across all that we do -- search, ads, Chrome, Android, Maps,
YouTube -- so that each of those services contributes to our
understanding of who you are.

What have you learned about how people are using
Google+?
We've found there is actually twice as much private sharing as
there is sharing visible to everyone on the internet. That's why
sometimes it looks like people sign up and then don't come back. In
fact, they're sharing with small groups of people that they trust
and love. It's just not publicly visible. So there's this sort of
dark matter that the public can't see.

What sorts of problems are people having?
There are two different kinds of experiences. There are the
early adopters who are carefully curating their circles. The
biggest challenge they face is what we call the noisy-stream
problem, in which a few active people overwhelm the conversation.
We need some tools to either suppress that noise or present the
information in a way that it doesn't dominate.

But there's another class of users who are having an
empty-stream problem. Either they have not added enough people to
their circles, or they have not yet connected to the people that
they care about. They're just not engaging and not visiting enough.
We have plans in place to address both ends of that spectrum.